Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents The Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Maya Vinokour and Rik Vosters 

Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 4:30 pm
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, 3401 Walnut St.,
Room 329, A Wing
(entrance next to Starbucks)

Why Does Werther Write?

Maya Vinokour, University of Pennsylvania

Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) is one of the best-known works in German literature. It appeared in countless translations, inspired imitations all over Europe, and fueled public anxieties with its implication in "copycat" suicides. Yet a closer look at the epistolary novel that made Goethe's literary name reveals a strange phenomenon: a work apparently devoted to the outpouring of the title character's innermost feelings and thoughts abounds with references to their essential inexpressibility. My paper explores this trope in Werther and its connection to the epistolary form in which it is couched. Why, I ask, does Werther write if it is only to say that he cannot?

~And~

'Read a hundred different books,

and you will find a hundred different spellings'

Myths of linguistic degeneration in 18th- and 19th-century Flanders

Rik Vosters, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The cultural life of the Southern Low Countries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth

century has often been described in profoundly negative terms: an utterly barren intellectual wasteland (Elias 1963). More often than not, language plays a major role in this narrative: under the different foreign rulers, French had become the Kultursprache of the higher social classes, leaving Dutch, the vernacular of old, to wither and decay as the Umgangssprache of the uncivilized and illiterate masses. According to 19th- and 20th-century linguists and language historians alike, this would have resulted in complete normative chaos and locally defined patois of Dutch, lacking the superstructure of a standard language for communication across the different dialect areas. As one grammarian noted in 1757 already: “Read a hundred different writings, even books, and you will find a hundred different spellings”.[1]

In this contribution, I will examine the origin and ideological underpinnings of these discourses of linguistic degeneration and chaos in Flanders, discovering how this negative image served – and still serves – clear language political agendas. The myth of Southern language decay will also be put to the test. By examining a wide range of prescriptive publications (grammars, spelling guides, schoolbooks, etc.), I will show that there was a vivid and coherent normative tradition in the Southern Low Country, distinct but closely related to its Northern counterpart. Furthermore, by looking at patterns of variation and change in a corpus of formal and less formal non-literary manuscripts, I will argue that there are no signs of strong dialect influence in the written language at the time. Rather that linguistic chaos, we witness ongoing standardization processes and an increasing convergence between Northern and Southern varieties of Dutch.

[1] Fondamenten ofte Grond-Regels der Neder-Duytsche Spel-Konst, Antwerpen: Hubertus Bincken. The

original reads: “[W]ant leést honderd verscheyde schriften, zelfs boeken, gy zult honderd

verscheyde spellingen vinden” (P.B. 1757: 3).